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Below are my assignments for week 2 on 'the Power of Value'. I chose to work traditionally on paper.

For the angel, I first experimented with harder pencils on a 90lb medium-tooth paper and while it is close to the tone of the original photo, I would have liked to have gone a little darker. I felt it was already little overworked and I didn't want to take any chances of wrecking it and having to start over. I'm told that harder pencils tend to work better on art board, so I may try that another time. The assignment was to copy the sample greyscale photos and either get as close to the values we saw or change the lighting entirely. I chose to draw what I saw because I wanted to learn from it.

For the lion I chose to not be so concerned with all the little details and just get the essence down. In the original photo, the lion's mane is a mass of detail. I also decided to experiment with pencil crayons on brown craft paper which was a lot of fun but I still felt that I could have pushed the darks more had I used conté or soft pencils instead.

For week 3 on 'the Power of Perspective', we were asked to draw or paint in greyscale using a couple of provided photos. The greyscale of the White House is from an old black and white photo and theLa Gondola photo was originally in colour.For speed I chose to paint both in Photoshop. Below are my efforts.

The balcony portion of the White House picture was a little tricky to draw because the building is almost parallel to the picture plane and so close to the horizon line that it made drawing a test of patience. I originally thought it was a cylinder set halfway inside the building but upon googling it, I discovered that it's not quite a half cylinder so I ended up eyeballing it while keeping it aligned to the perspective I set. I did make the perspective slightly different than the photo where the right vanishing point is further out and I gave the White House a little more breathing space around it and added some more trees. The La Gondola picture was also challenging because of the various elevations of the buildings and the three-point perspective. I resisted the urge to cheat and use Manga Studio. :) All in all, these were great exercises. I think I'm getting more comfortable painting in greyscale so that's a plus.